10 comments:

The "served from a tap" GB Lager which you refer to must be one of the biggest beer marketing disasters of all time - while lager undeniably has a laddish image (and back then had more of one) the last thing lager drinkers wanted was an image of nostalgic Britishness.

Yes, have just been looking for info on it, the fact that the beer came from something resembling a bath tap would presumably have given off the subliminal message that the stuff was water; I seem to remember not long before then Brendan at Iceni launched a lager called LAD (I think). Talking of laddishness, the Taste had a report on a Whitbread report that had identified various drinkers, one of which was streaming, which normally meant people on the piss; they were quite happy to feed this market in their pubs, whatever the streamers drank, usually premium lagers that made them feel good and feel shit the next morning in the cells.

I wrote one of my favourite series of articles for the Taste (the editor was an old mate of my brother's), on deeply obscure beers found lurking in the back of dodgy off-licences, like Canadian-labelled pst-its-sellby-date Schlitz. Deliberately taste-testing shite beer was actually great fun.

GB lager was admittedly a disaster, but the logic behind it understandable. The Fosttrailia lager advertising of the 80’s repackaged lager within an anglicised culture and less of a European lederhosen wearing image. A UK lager brand and image was a long time coming. Carling are doing the same with Carling today, marketing it as a British lager and ignoring its Canadian roots. Ask most people what country they associate with which beer, carling will be associated with Britain. The off-putting thing about GB lager wasn’t so much its laddish adverts or bar fronts, it had a really tacky generic brand logo. Carling on the other hand got the distribution bang on, the soccer related marketing bang on and are now banging on about the providence of their ingredients and knowing who your mates are. The idea of GB lager was spot on, its implementation piss poor.